November 2001

Nine months have passed since draft sequences of the human genome were first published.1,2 One human gestation period later, the genome, as deciphered by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, still screams toward its projected Spring 2003 finish date. "The trajectory we're on for meeting that goal is precisely on target," assures Francis Collins, director, National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and spokesperson for the largest public biological science project in histor

Last year, scientists described how partial reproductive isolation between two sockeye salmon populations had evolved at the astonishingly rapid rate of about 13 generations. This was stunning to many biologists, who think of reproductive isolation as a process that evolves over tens of thousands, or even millions of years, but certainly not decades.1 Researchers led by Andrew Hendry, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, used microsatellite markers and morphologi

It wasn't easy getting to the 4th International Meeting on Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and Complex Genome Analysis held Oct. 10-15 at the Wenner-Gren Foundation in Stockholm. A week earlier, as flight cancellations continued in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, SwissAir had declared bankruptcy and an SAS jet had crashed in Milan, further disrupting schedules. So it was little surprise that several speakers had to phone in their talks. But not J. Craig Venter, president and chief sc

From TV dinners to computers, improving speed and efficiency are deemed the true hallmarks of progress. The same tenet holds true in science: Why wait thousands of years for nature to do its work when it can be done in a few months? This is the concept behind the new biotech firm Morphotek. Using a patented technology platform called morphogenics, the company has given evolution's normal crawling pace a rocket-powered backpack. Philadelphia-based Morphotek creates genetically altered host orga

One of the enduring questions in biology is how eukaryotic cells arose from prokaryotic ancestors at least 2 billion years ago. Besides differences in genome organization, eukaryotic animals, plants, and fungi possess a much higher degree of cellular compartmentation in the form of membrane bound organelles than their distant bacterial and Archaean cousins. But how did such a plethora of cellular domains, each with a discrete role in metabolism, evolve? To the extent that science proves anythi

The National Institutes of Health is now accepting applications for grants in embryonic stem cell research after unveiling its Web-based Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry (http://escr.nih.gov/). About a handful of applications have been received so far; the first awards should be announced in early 2002. This registry lists names and contact information for 11 worldwide organizations offering 72 cell lines that meet the federal funding requirements outlined by President George W. Bush in August

On Sept. 11, did you feel as you wanted to help, but could not, as you were numb? I sat bleary-eyed in front of the TV, despite being a professor of epidemiology. I did not know what I could do. Perhaps the best approach we as scientists can take is the building of a global scientist Civil Defense. About two weeks before Sept. 11, my colleagues and I published in the Lancet an article suggesting that the public health and scientific systems guarding against a terrorist attack were in adequate.

We continue to fret about peer review.1 But with the abundance of journals in every field today, just about anything that has a bit of novelty in it can get published somewhere if the authors persist. What is more important than good peer review is critical reading of articles no matter where they are published. The fact that an article makes it to print should not cause us to lower our analytical senses when attempting to build on the information provided in that article regardless of the perce

Gloria Lenhoff is a 46-year-old lyric soprano singer who has performed with such diverse groups as the San Diego Master Chorale and members of Aerosmith. She can sing nearly 2,500 songs in more than 25 languages, reportedly in a perfect accent. She even has perfect pitch. But the rest of her world is not perfect. Gloria is affected by a rare genetic disorder called Williams syndrome. With an IQ of about 55, Gloria literally cannot subtract three from five or make change for a dollar. But what

Sifting through the 3 billion letters of DNA that comprise the human genome to find disease-associated sequences is at best a daunting task. But recent evidence suggests that this genome is organized into highly structured blocks called haplotypes, highly conserved packages that contain SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and exhibit very little genotypic variation. Enlisting these haplotypes in the search may make this undertaking easier than previously thought. Evidence of such organizati

For people who have suffered a massive traumatic injury--from a car crash, building collapse, or other life-threatening event--modern health care is paradoxical in nature. While the emergency room is successful in prolonging lives, it is the body's system failures that eventually kill trauma patients. "If you look at the successes that medicine has had in our ability to capture individuals immediately after trauma, to resuscitate them, get them to the emergency room, we've been remarkably succes

Does the brain have a center of consciousness? Until now, the prevailing opinion has been that anesthetics and other agents of unconsciousness act widely across the cerebral cortex and spinal cord. But a new finding suggests the existence of a barbiturate-sensitive switch (M. Devor, et al., "Reversible analgesia, atonia, and loss of consciousness on bilateral intracerebral microinjection of pentobarbital," Pain, 94:101-12, October 2001). Using barbiturate microinjections, Hebrew University of Je

As the complete human genome sequence emerges, research shifts from questions of genomics to those of proteomics--determining the function of individual gene products and mapping global gene expression patterns. Gene expression patterns change continually during the course of tissue development and differentiation. The expression of different gene products at any given time within a particular cell defines the cell's characteristics and helps determine how it will react to external stimuli. Alte

Few biological fields have benefited from technological advances as much as genomics. The field could not be where it is today without progress in automated sequencing methods and in software to interpret, annotate, and manage the voluminous data that these automated sequencers churn out. Without this latter development, researchers would be hard pressed to read and understand these gigabytes of data--the equivalent of having an encrypted encyclopedia without a deciphering key. (See related sto